The spade has turned: from weltschmerz to mono no aware and back again.

mono no aware After many years of digging, I am pretty sure I have hit bedrock.

The spade has turned.

Human behaviour and all the products of human behaviour are best understood as expressions of the human tendency to allocate resources according to status.

Practically-speaking, a person’s survival depends on their membership in a group and their status in it. Additionally, success — however it is defined over and beyond survival and reproduction — also depends on and is defined by an individual’s membership in a group and their status in it.

There is nothing — absolutely nothing — that trumps, circumvents or transcends the ceaseless churn of seeking, gaining, maintaining and losing the approval of others.

And so it goes. Fine weather, isn’t it?

Unreal city: a black hole of dazzling light

A picture of the unreal city at night.

I remember the moment, but I can’t place it in time.

We were returning to Waterloo from Toronto. It was night. The stream of lights heading east on the 401 was an endless milky way.

It struck me: behind each set of quivering headlights, there was at least one person. It struck me: on one side of this narrow strip of highway, heading east towards a moderately-sized metropolitan city, there was a galaxy of human experience, unique distinct breathing and, like me, living at the centre of its own universe. It struck me.

At high school in Ottawa, I remember it often felt like I was surrounded on all sides by unknown, colourless, cardboard people, who reappeared over and over again like the recycled backgrounds of a low-budget cartoon. Many years later and long after the moment of dread on the highway heading west from Toronto to Waterloo, it struck me: I was as colourless and unreal to the unknown others as they were to me.

I now live in Toronto, a city as unreal as Eliot’s. From my window, I see towers and towers of existences. When I walk to and from work, there is always a hornet’s nest of activity. When I shop within minutes of my home, I see faces that I know I will never see again. Like a shovel of dirt from a wild and healthy field, these few blocks of my existence are teeming with life.

If I reflect for too long on the scale of life in this city and on this planet, it obviates me. If I focus instead on the energy, colours and details of this urban microcosm, I am dazzled by it all, and happy to play the role of cardboard cutout to the unknown universes of life booming and buzzing around me.

Oh, unreal city, at the centre of a black hole where all light is trapped, could it be as dazzling as this?

My own private iconoclasm: making the word flesh once and for all

After many many years of reading, writing and thinking, I have arrived at the rather unremarkable conclusion that reading, writing and thinking are neither important nor unimportant in and of themselves.

They are human activities like any other and, as such, their value is ultimately determined by other humans. They can influence others — if they influence at all — only because of the values and valuings of families, peers, and communities. They can’t convince, compel, or convert on their own. They do not have quasi-divine and human-independent power to influence humans and their affairs.

I mention this only because I suspect that I may have implicitly believed all these years that reading, writing and thinking did have quasi-divine powers, even I can’t recall ever explicitly thinking to myself, “if I read, write and think just so, people will have no choice but to understand and agree.” Why else would I spend so much time reading and rereading, writing and rewriting, thinking and rethinking? Of course, I enjoyed it, but there are many other enjoyable activities I might have pursued instead. The intensity of my dedication seems to imply that I was hoping for something more.

School, university and academia probably helped to engender this implicit hope for the quasi-divine power of reading, writing and thinking. From the earliest days of school until the very end of academia, I was taught that the correct reading, writing and thinking would produce and, perhaps, even compel the appropriate mark, degree, or publication. It was as if there was a kind of magic at work — a magic that inevitably produced success when it was invoked correctly.

The implicit hope for the quasi-divine power of reading, writing and thinking was also stoked in the early days of social media. Time-and-again, it was (and is) claimed that there is a uniquely correct way to succeed at social media. Do it correctly, we were (are) told, and the followers, likes, pageviews and advertising dollars will inevitably flow. In the end, we have learned that there isn’t anything entirely unique about social media. Like any other human activity, there are many familiar but not entirely certain paths to success and failure.

I suppose William Carlos Williams also contributed to my implicit hope. As a young man, I was entranced by the idea that he remained a doctor, lived in Paterson, New Jersey, and, nevertheless, became a towering literary figure. According to the official hagiography, he opted out of the lifestyle of a poet but, nevertheless, became one of the greatest. I assumed, at the time, that it was the power of his words and talent that helped him overcome the geography of his choices. I see now that I overlooked the true power of the relationships he maintained.

I am tempted to be troubled by the non-divine nature of reading, writing and thinking, to characterize it as a problem, and to draw some profound conclusion, but I’ve been down that path too many times before to make the same mistake again. The absence of God only seems troubling if you characterize it as an absence, but to do so is a mistake. That which never existed can’t be absent because it was never present to begin with, no matter how it might have otherwise felt.   

The only real consequence of this realization is that I must give up on an ancient and essentially childish dream. Neither the bug-eating mystic in the desert, nor the stone-throwing philosopher on the mountain, nor the house-call-making poet in New Jersey can, by the shear force of reading, writing and thinking, legislate on behalf of the world. Read, write, and think if you enjoy it, but don’t expect or pretend that it will have any more influence on humans and their affairs than counting blades of grass, memorizing all the digits of pi, or surfing off the coast of Maui. To influence human affairs, one must be a part of them. There is no escaping that fact of human existence.

Thus spoke Zarathustra.

The rise and fall of social media: a swift and familiar tale

The rise and fall of social media has been so swift and so familiar that the story of its rise and fall probably says more about us than it does about the tools themselves.

In the early days, social media seemed revolutionary and, at times, it was. Unfortunately, like all revolutionaries who win, social media has come to mirror the status quo it had initially challenged.

Twitter, Facebook, YouTube (et al) now look, feel and act very much like the traditional media many of us were avoiding when we first joined these digital networks.

Advertising, of course, was a key player in the counterrevolution, but social media turned to advertising only because a profit had to be turned and it had to be turned quickly. Old and familiar habits die hard when they boost revenues and profits easily.

Meanwhile, as the masters of the social media universe learned to dance to the tune called by the advertisers, the users themselves (myself included) set about trying to monetize their activities on social media. Socializing for its own sake quickly (d)evolved into network marketing. Eventually, those of us who did not become viral millionaires parlayed our social media cred into paid positions. Others simply walked away from the tools. We all returned to our familiar folds, even as we shook our fists at the masters of the social media universe for doing the same.

The pure-of-heart revolutionary will likely sneer at the bourgeois sell-outs, but they can do so with a clear conscious only if they are not at all concerned about hypocrisy. The revolutionary is a network marketer with a different call-to-action.

Indeed, the revolutionary, the marketer, and the poet are of imagination all compact. Whenever they see a crowd, they imagine an army they can rally to their own cause — a cause that not-coincidentally puts bread on their table too. It’s what we humans seem to do whenever we are given half-a-chance. We always seem to want to turn the lead of our relationships into the gold of wealth and power. Perhaps, it is the natural inverse of the fact that our relationships have always been the surest path to survival, power and wealth.

Social media, it now seems to me, was one more stage upon which we could strut and fret our way through this familiar tale. From time-to-time in human history, the status quo is upset by some unexpected and novel circumstance like social media. In these times of uncertainty, some outsiders move in, some insiders are forced out, and, eventually, the new and novel is normalized, contained, and pacified. As the dust settles, a new status quo consolidates and the longing for the next revolution begins.

With the benefit of hindsight, I suppose, the only remarkable thing is that I (and, perhaps, others) are surprised by this inevitable outcome. Like Charlie Brown, lying flat on his back staring at the sky, we are dumbfounded that we are on our backs again and, at the same time, incredulous that we fooled ourselves once more into believing for one glorious moment that it might end differently this time.

And it is true, if we look only at the abstract narrative arc: we are trapped, like Charlie Brown, Sisyphus, and the pendulum, in a seemingly futile inevitability. The devil and salvation, however, are in the details. With each push of the rock, every missed football, and each swing of the pendulum, we change and, if we are lucky, we learn. Progress, like science, begins and ends with failure. We push, we race, and we swing not to win but to experience. The reward comes when we return to the rock, race once more towards the football, and swing again into the void hoping against hope — believing — that this time it will end differently, even when we know that it won’t. It is in that moment of hope that we seem to escape the inevitable physics of our humanity. Then, the weight of the rock turns against us, the football is missed, and the pendulum begins it inescapable return. Arc after arc, life after life, generation after generation until, if we are lucky, our descendants live and are different enough from us to look back on our efforts to tell a story of progress. We are trapped but it is not necessarily futile. The trap itself begets the idea of escape and with that hope anything is possible.

Avoid stony indifference: prime your audiences directly

When it comes to communications planning, organizations of every ilk seem to spend a lot of time fussing about messages, tactics and products.

Communication, however — the very thing we are hoping to facilitate with this planning — only happens between people who are already connected and attending to each other — giving and sharing their attention.

In other words, a well-crafted message is only a message if people are ready to receive it and understand it. Otherwise, it is one more tree falling noiselessly in a forest.

The need to prime an audience for a message or story is the central insight of effective media relations. The very best people working in media relations build and nurture relationships with reporters and editors, to ensure they are ready to hear a pitch when it is made. The relationship — not the press release, key message or holding line — usually makes and shapes the story.

However, the story, much like the well-crafted key message, is only a story if people are ready to receive and understand it.  

Today, all of your audiences are very much like reporters and editors. Thousands of people are clamouring for their attention every minute of every day. Thanks to social media, they also have the means to reach thousands of people any minute of any day.

However, the influencer’s social media post, like the reporter’s front page story and your well-crafted message, is meaningful only if people are ready to receive and understand it.  

Thinking again of the example of effective media relations, we know the relationship is the most important consideration when it comes to priming an audience for a message. Relationships, we also know, happen between people. They can, in some cases, be nurtured digitally but nothing will ever surpass the effectiveness of regular and face-to-face interactions.  

This means, I think, that the people in an organization who most often directly interact with the organization’s primary target audience must be empowered to nurture the kind of relationship that will prime the audience to receive and understand the organization’s message. If it works for the media, it should work for other audiences too.

The challenge, of course, will be to nurture as many individual relationships as possible and to do it as efficiently as possible.

This goal has always been the siren song of media relations and, more recently, of social media influencers. A well-placed story or Instagram post, it is assumed, reaches a larger audience much more efficiently.

While this might have been true once upon a time, we now know that the chance of reaching a target audience through these means is much more of a gamble and not a sure thing. It is also much more difficult to control the message that is delivered. An organization’s own employees, I think, are in a much better position to prime its audiences effectively.

The other important consideration is operational.

Who in an organization is ultimately accountable for ensuring that all employees who engage with the organization’s audiences are empowered to prime them for its message?

Because this outcome involves communication, many different parts of an organization could share the responsibility. Crucially, however, if no one part of it is definitively accountable, the organization’s approach will be neither uniform nor coherent and ultimately piecemeal.

If your audience is hearing multiple messages from different parts of the organization, it won’t hear any of them or only those it wants to hear.   

Ultimately, there are many paths to your target audience, but, if your audience is not ready to receive and understand your message, it will not be communicated. The path taken will matter little.

If it makes good sense to prime journalists and editors and social media influencers to hear your message, it makes good sense to prime your target audience directly, relying on the employees who most often interact with it.

If no part of your organization is specifically accountable for ensuring that all relevant employees are empowered to prime your audience, it is likely that no one is doing it or, at best, it being done piecemeal or as an afterthought.

If that is true, your organization is overlooking the most important piece of the communication puzzle. Without the charitable attention of your audiences, your messages, tactics and products will encounter only stony indifference.



The alpha and omega of our humanity: an all-too-familiar trope

It is a standard narrative trope. We’ve encountered and enjoyed it millions of times: life is not as it seems. Our hero is not what she appears to be. Behind the veil of illusion, there is a different and more profound reality to discover.

If I have previously reflected on the ubiquity of this trope, I probably concluded that it is so commonplace only because it is a very easy idea to hang a story around.

I am now wondering if there is something much more fundamental to the trope. I am wondering if an ability and willingness to treat direct experience as an illusion behind which a more fundamental reality exists is the ultimate source of our humanness.

Take, for example, religion and science.

On the one hand, religion tells us that the savage and unpredictable storm is really an angry god. On the other hand, science tells us the storm is really an atmospheric disturbance created by the interplay of fundamental laws. The explanations are different, but they both rely on the idea that the truth of the matter is very different from what we directly experience. For them both, direct experience is an illusion behind which a more fundamental reality exists.

With these examples in mind, take a closer look at learning, creativity, language, consciousness, hermeneutics, the human reproductive cycle — really, just about anything fundamental to understanding humans as humans — and the trope turns up time and again. It seems to be as ubiquitous in reality as it is in our stories. If that is correct, perhaps, the trope appears in our stories so often only because we are fundamentally the kinds of beings that make sense of the world from that perspective. Perhaps, our stories mirror and reinforce an innate way of looking at the world.

Now, if this is true, here is a curious thing.

True happiness, the sages often tell us, is found only when we learn to appreciate the here and now, our given circumstances, the moment. Unhappiness, we are told time and again, is rooted in an inability or an unwillingness to appreciate the inherent value of direct experience. We suffer unnecessarily only when we grasp for superfluous wants beyond the here and now.

If the sages and I are both correct, it looks like our ability and willingness to treat direct experience as an illusion behind which a more fundamental reality exists is not only what makes us fundamentally human but it is also the root cause of our unhappiness. We are our most human, it seems, when we treat the given as something to be looked through and dismissed. We are also our most unhappy when we fail to appreciate what we are experiencing in the moment.

My highly speculative and totally-talking-out-of-my-ass theory to make sense of this apparent conflict is that the species is coping with a recent adaptation. Our brains, at some point in our recent evolutionary history, developed an ability to treat direct experience as an illusion behind which a more fundamental reality exists. From this adaptation, many of our most distinctively human traits have sprung. We are, nevertheless, mammals fundamentally and, for most of our evolution, we were animals that took direct experience as a given and succeeded because of it. We carry both traits in us now because they both helped us to succeed over the course of our existence.

The big worry for me, however, is that the ability to treat direct experience as an illusion behind which a more fundamental reality exists might actually be a maladaptive trait. Because of it, we dominate and control the environment like no other species and are reproducing at a frenetic rate. On first impression, this seems like the very definition of an evolutionary win. However, if our species gets wiped out in the next century or two because of our domination of the environment and frenetic population growth, that will be a undisputable lose. Our “success” might be so fleeting in geological terms that in a few thousand years no trace of us will remain beyond a curious spike in carbon emissions. If that is the case, as a species, we would have been much better off never developing the traits that allowed us to dominate nature and reproduce so frenetically.

There, of course, remains an outside chance that enough people will recognize the reality of what is coming and act together to make the dramatic changes necessary to avert the species’ oblivion. Perhaps, our day-to-day existence will become so difficult that we will have no choice but to change our ways before it is too late. There is even the faint hope of some kind of technological fix. And while the colonization of other planets is also feasible, abandoning the ship does not really seem like much of a solution or a victory, when we were the ones who scuttled it.

It seems we have painted ourselves into the corner of a familiar story. A catastrophic outcome is inevitable and only a miracle will save us. Is there a plucky band of misfits assembling now who will save us, thanks to their courage and conviction? Perhaps, a higher power or powers has already picked the chosen one and will reveal his or her true destiny shortly. Perhaps, that flickering light is not a star but a starship racing towards us, laden with the technology and know-how we will need to survive and flourish. One can only hope that there is some reality in these well-worn fantasies, but that in itself is an all-too-familiar story.

One more exorcism: there is no force in reason

We like to think that reasoning, logic and argument can compel a change of belief and force others to agree with us. This presumption is so deeply and widely accepted that we too easily overlook the spooky magic at the core of the standard characterization of reasoning, logic, argument, and, ultimately, thinking itself. Our beliefs certainly do change but there is no reason to believe that reasoning, logic or argument forces us to do it.

In the standard account of a well-reasoned and logical argument, someone makes their case by articulating premises that are probably true. Then, they illustrate how a conclusion is a natural consequence of those premises. Finally, they assert that the conclusion must also be true because the premises are true.

At this point, the other person involved in the argument must accept that the conclusion is true. If they are not so inclined to make this concession, they must demonstrate that the premises aren’t true or that the conclusion is not a natural consequence of those premises. However, in the end, if the premises are determined to be true and it is agreed that the conclusion follows from the premises, in the standard account, the conclusion must also be true and must be accepted as true. At this point, everyone who previously thought the conclusion to be false promptly accepts that it is true and realigns their other beliefs accordingly.

Now, if you have ever been in argument with anyone about anything, you know that arguments rarely if ever play out in this fashion. Even when the people involved in the argument agree in principle with the standard model of argumentation that I’ve just outlined, they will rarely change their minds in this way, especially if anything of any value or importance is at stake in the argument. At best, they may concede that the opposing argument is sound or plausible but they will almost always insist that there is something wrong with it that, for the moment, they are overlooking.

Logicians, philosophers and know-it-alls of every ilk generally characterize this as a consequence of the inherent fallibility of humans. For them, we humans know the ideal form of reasoning, logic and argument but, like fallen angels everywhere, we simply can’t measure up to it. A few gods amongst can, perhaps, but most mere mortals can’t.

This, of course, is absurd. If there really is some kind of force at work in reasoning, logic, and argument, it should consistently work in predictable ways and not only in trivial or paradigm cases.

Today, we now know enough about brains to predict with some certainty that the fundamental mechanism of belief change will almost certainly be neurological. If that is the case, the notion that reasoning, logic, and well-formed arguments have any role to play in belief change looks even more dubious. Are we too imagine that some neurons are especially attuned to the sweet harmonies of reasoning, logic and well-formed arguments? Of course not.

Instead and much more plausibly, because we know that the connections between brain cells strengthen when the same cells frequently communicate with each other, it seems much more likely that our beliefs change in response to stimuli that make the very same neurons communicate with each other in new ways over and over again. We may already see this mechanism in action today, thanks to cable news and the echo chamber of social media. It certainly seems like people change their beliefs simply because they hear a statement, claim or talking point repeated over and over again.

Because we are primates and the most important stimuli in our environment are other humans, I suspect, the experience of belief change will always feel sociological to us, even if it really is neurological. The people you associate with, listen to, and identify with will ultimately determine what counts for you as reasonable premises, sound reasoning, and appropriate evidence. If people in your tribe repeat a claim over and over again, I suspect you will also eventually believe it too, with or without argument. This isn’t something that only happens to those whackos who watch Fox news. It happens to all humans everywhere — including you and me. It isn’t an aberration or a moral failing . It is just the way humans create, reinforce, and change their beliefs.